Thanks for the Adventure
by Grac3
Summary: Part eight of the Angel!Verse. The Doctor is slowly dying of radiation poisoning, but he has enough time to visit some old companions before he turns into a new man - whoever that new man may turn out to be. Episode tag: The End of Time Part 2/The Eleventh Hour (re-write). Twoshot. Title is from Up.
1. The Doctor Dies

**A.N.:** I'd just like to apologise in advance for the feels.

**A.N.2:** Ignore the Janto fangirling. I kind of got away with myself a bit there...

**Warnings:** Massive spoilers for Children of Earth, major but brief religious reference

**Series summary: **The TARDIS doesn't always take the Doctor where he wants to go, but it always takes him where he needs to go; Time Lords hold a secret behind their backs, and they have a duty to follow.

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or the lines from The End of Time Part 2)**

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Chapter 1 – The Doctor Dies

In the end, the Doctor felt that he deserved to have his revenge. After all, Rassilon had ruined his life and all of his relationships by putting that maddening drumbeat in his head.

Yet he didn't think that the Master should have had to sacrifice himself; when the blinding white light died down and the Master was no longer standing there just in front of him, the Doctor knew exactly where he was: he was stuck, with the other Time Lords, on Gallifrey, on the Last Day – on the worst day.

For all intents and purposes, the Master – his best enemy – was dead.

But _he_ wasn't.

He had been so sure, so terrified, that he would die at some point during this business, but here he was: he was still alive. He was on his hands and knees on the floor of the Naismith mansion covered in cuts and bruises and broken glass, but he was still alive…

Then there were four knocks, and the Doctor knew that it was over.

The four knocks, it turned out, weren't the Master after all; they were Wilf, Donna's wonderful grandfather, who was trapped in a radiation chamber. He didn't deserve to die – especially not like that – so the Doctor took his place and suffered the agony of absorbing all of the radiation as it flooded the chamber.

And then the process started. This would be a slow and painful regeneration as the radiation systematically killed off all of his cells one by one, but at least it would give him enough time to visit everyone before he went.

He started with Martha and Ricky; Martha had gone freelance since Earth had been stolen, having left the red caps of UNIT behind her, and had ended up marrying Ricky – now _that_, the Doctor hadn't been expecting. Yet they seemed to work well as a couple, and they even went on missions together. Yet not all of the missions that they went on ran smoothly – especially not the ones that ended up with them being in the line of sight of a Sontaran gun.

The Doctor hit the Sontaran on the back of the neck with a hammer that had been lying nearby – they were lucky that their chase had led them to a building site and the Time Lord could find something to help them so quickly – saving their lives before he went off to see the next person.

Sarah Jane had been one of his most faithful companions, sticking by him through a regeneration when so many others wouldn't have been able to deal with it, and seeing three of his faces during her relatively short life; and now she had a son – a son who wasn't looking where he was going when he crossed the road because he was talking on his phone, and the Doctor hadn't been able to save the Pete Tyler of this universe from being run over, but he could certainly save Luke Smith from the same fate.

Jack was depressed; the children of Earth had been hijacked and he had managed to save the day with his friends at Torchwood, but only at a great cost to himself: not only had he lost his grandson and sabotaged his already practically non-existent relationship with his daughter, but he had lost the Welshman in the suit.

The Doctor had seen Jack hit on people of all ages, genders, and species over the years that he had known him – and he had even been hit on a few times himself by the ex-Time Agent – but he knew that there was no one that Jack Harkness had ever truly loved more than Ianto Jones.

So the Doctor told him about Alonso, because Ianto would have wanted him to move on, because Ianto had had no idea just how much Jack had loved him – and just how much Jack would always love him – and if Alonso could go some way to healing the broken 51st Century boy, then that was fine with the Doctor.

The Doctor still felt guilty about Joan Redfern, and how he had so unwillingly and unknowingly deceived her when he had been forced to make himself human. Her great-granddaughter had found her diary and written it up, publishing it as a book some century after the events had happened in the timeline of the universe. She was signing copies of her wondrous story put to paper at a book shop. The Doctor went to see her, because she would know, and he _had_ to know.

He could tell that she recognised him as soon as she saw him. Of course she would have seen pictures of him from her great-grandmother's diaries, and possibly from the journal that he had kept himself during that time, with the drawings of all of his faces as he remembered them from that part of his mind that he had been compelled to lock away, and of course she would believe that that the man now standing before her was the same man that her great-grandmother had loved all those years ago at that school of doomed boys, because she accepted that he had been a man from the stars.

He was grateful for that, because it meant that he didn't need to explain; he could just ask.

"Was she happy? In the end?"

Joan's great-granddaughter, who looked so like her that the little bit of John Smith still left inside of him cried out from within that this was the same woman that he had fallen in love with all those years ago – but, of course, it wasn't – nodded and answered his question simply.

"Yes, yes, she was," she assured him, and the Doctor was relieved. Joan Redfern was a good woman, and she deserved to be happy – especially after all he had put her through.

Donna was next, but he wouldn't be able to see Donna herself, not face to face; it was far too risky, and no one deserved to die on their wedding day – especially not someone who had once been the most important woman in the universe.

He didn't go and see her straight away, though; he went to see her father first, and got a quid off of him so that he could buy a lottery ticket that he knew was going to make Donna a very rich woman.

Then he went to the wedding, and he saw her come out of the church with her new husband. Her dress didn't have straps, and the scars from when she had been the Doctor Donna would have bene visible on her back – the Doctor briefly wondered how Sylvia and Wilf had explained those away to her, and to the rest of her friends and family who might have happened upon them at some point in the months and years since they had appeared.

Sylvia noticed him first, standing outside the TARDIS and watching the proceedings. She and Wilf came over, and that was the last time that he was going to see any of them, so he gave them the lottery ticket as a wedding present for his best friend and went back to the TARDIS by himself, because he was very close to the end and there was only one more person who he had to see.

He couldn't be seen – it would mess up the timelines if he was seen – so he stayed out of the way, leaning up against a wall as the pain of his radiation poisoning slowly began to kick in. He had, up to this point, been ignoring the torture of all his cells slowly dying, but it was getting more and more difficult to focus on anything else, and he was so distracted by it that he almost didn't notice when Rose walked passed, her back to him him as she made her way back home.

Oh.

_Ow_.

He hadn't quite expected it to hurt that much when he saw her again; it certainly was far more painful than slowly deteriorating from radiation poisoning could ever be.

She hadn't noticed that he was there, and he wasn't planning on letting her; this Rose hadn't met him yet, and she couldn't see him before she had met him, because if she had seen him this early in her personal timeline, then she should have recognised him during the Auton invasion, and she hadn't, so she couldn't have seen him on this cold and snowy New Year's Eve.

But a wave of agony washed over him from the radiation, and he couldn't help but let out a small groan.

"You alright, mate?"

Damn. She had seen him. Would that change time? Or would she forget what she had seen this night?

"Yeah," he lied as he looked back up at her from the snow-covered ground.

"Too much to drink?" she smirked, and the Doctor couldn't believe how much he had missed seeing her smile.

"You could say that."

"Maybe it's time you went home," she suggested, and as he felt his hearts rate drop, she didn't know just how close to home he actually was. He nodded in response. "Anyway; happy New Year!"

"And yourself," he nodded, and Rose turned to walk away, but he wasn't ready to let her leave just yet, because surely this would be the last time that he would ever see her – but that didn't really matter, now that he was dying, because she had been the love of his ninth life, and maybe his tenth would find someone else, but even if he didn't, he could tell from this instant that Rose Tyler would not occupy the same space in his new hearts as she had done in these old and tired and wan hearts that were slowly beating to a stop in his chest.

"What year is it?" he called, just so that she would turn around and he would get to see her face again.

"Blimey, how much have you had?" she laughed. "2005, January the first."

The Doctor knew it; he just needed to hear it from her. It was almost bittersweet that he was ending his time a mere few months before she was starting hers.

"I reckon this year'll be great," he told her. "For both of us."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Rose chuckled, backing away slightly, but she still had a sincere smile on her face. "See you."

_Yes_, he thought, _you will_.

But as he watched her go through the door to the block of flats in which she lived, the radiation poisoning kicked in with a vengeance. He cried out in pain, knowing that he had to get to the TARDIS, but he was only halfway there when he collapsed onto his hands and knees in the middle of the Powell Estate.

But Ood Sigma was there, telling him that the universe was going to sing him to sleep. He hadn't been lying, and the song that followed was hauntingly beautiful – as though it had a power of its own, which the Doctor had no doubt that it did. It gave him the strength that he needed to push himself up off of the ground and onto his feet, and stumble towards the TARDIS. An overwhelming feeling of finality washed over him as he stepped through the familiar door and set the old girl in flight.

Once they were in the Time Vortex, he stood next to the control panel, watching with defeated mournfulness as the golden regeneration energy began to glow around his hands.

It was starting.


	2. The Doctor Flies

**A.N.:** This is my personal headcanon of what regeneration is like; it might not be the same for everyone, but this is how I think it happens.

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or the lines from The End of Time Part 2)**

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Chapter 2 – The Doctor Flies

Regeneration was a funny thing. The Doctor had done it enough times that he was well aware of just how it felt to die and change and be effectively reborn like a phoenix rising from the ashes – even though he had carefully avoided it during his first life, as people did when they had never died before, out of fear of just what might happen, until he was forced into his second life by that body having been run ragged and he ended up collapsing out of pure exhaustion – yet he didn't think that he would ever get used to the uniquely peculiar sensation.

He felt himself shrinking – not his body, but his consciousness – until he became not himself but a collection of memories. Anything else about him disappeared, burned away by the golden energy surrounding him as he changed atom by atom. Around that cluster of memories – which grew with each regeneration – a new self was built from scratch: a new body, a new personality, but with the same mind and the same memories and the same knowledge of self; he was still confident that he was still the same person throughout time and space, but merely with different characteristics and mannerisms.

Yet the process was painful, far more painful than he remembered it ever being before. His new vocal cords were screaming as the process was completed, and the golden energy evaporated quickly as the old, brash, Northern exterior was replaced with something… new.

The first thing that he noticed was that his clothes were too big – far too big – but he didn't particularly mind because he'd been wearing leather for two lives now and he really wanted to try something different this time round.

Yet clothes were inconsequential; they could be changed with minimal effort – he needed to know what he _looked_ like.

He looked down at himself, seeing a skinny and lanky body.

"Legs!" he exclaimed, excited at the prospect of the limbs. He lifted his left leg to make sure that he wasn't hallucinating having such wonderful appendages. "I've still got legs!" He bent down to kiss his knee before moving on to the other aspects of this new body.

"Good. Arms. Hands…" He lifted his hands to inspect them, twiddling his fingers energetically. "Ooh, fingers! Lots of fingers!"

He reached up to his face and individually inspected his ears, his eyes, his nose – he'd had worse. He was surprised by his chin, but not nearly as much as he was by his hair.

There was so _much_ of it! He'd been practically bald last time – where had all _this_ come from? His mind, which was still unsure of how it worked, could come up with only one explanation as he ran the long locks through his energetic fingers.

"I'm a girl!" he squeaked, and his high-pitched voice certainly seemed to support that conclusion, but he'd been flat chested when he'd looked down at himself, and he was sure that his voice had sounded deeper when he'd been muttering to himself previously.

"No… no!" he reached down to his Adam's apple and found that he had been mistaken. "I'm not a girl."

He was relieved at that, because after nine lifetimes of being fairly consistent with his biological sex, he didn't think that he would be able to work out just what to do with a female body by this stage in his regeneration cycle, but there was one more thing that he just had to know…

He grabbed his luscious fringe and pulled it down, thankful that it was so long that he didn't have to look in a mirror to inspect it, so that he could see it for himself. Excitement built within him as he pulled the locks down in front of his face, only for it to turn to sheer disappointment when he saw the true property of this new Barnet.

It was brunette.

"And still not ginger!" he growled, and he made a mental note of the fact that this body could get frustrated; that was good to know – frustration could come in handy.

His personal inspection over, he felt a niggling inside his head; there was something that he was forgetting – he was sure of it.

"There's something else," he muttered, "there's something… important. I'm…" His frustration at the elusiveness of the information he was trying to remember was building as he tapped the sides of his head with his first two energetic fingers on each hand. "I'm…"

Somewhere behind him, there was a massive explosion that sent him flying to the ground. He collided with the metal grating and looked up at the destruction that he had only just noticed. The TARDIS was falling apart, sparks fizzing all around him and parts of the control room were on fire.

That could only mean one thing, he realised, cackling.

"Crashing!" he cried happily, laughing and whooping as he pushed himself onto his knees so that he could reach some of the controls. "Geronimo!"

The TARDIS was spiralling out of control, flying wildly wherever they were as the Doctor desperately tried to regain control. He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of the inside pocket of the now far too big leather jacket before shedding the garment and dropping it rather unceremoniously on the floor of the control room. He pointed the screwdriver at the controls, trying to regain some semblance of normality within the ship so that he could at least keep the old girl in an upright position.

Yet he didn't seem to have much of a handle on his screwdriver yet, and all he succeeded in doing was to tip the TARDIS so that the doors flew open and he found himself sliding against the grating towards the open doorway.

Yelling in fright, he tried to reach out for the floor at the edge of the doorway to grab on to it so that he could pull himself back up into the ship, but his fingers slipped on the edge and he fell out of the TARDIS, heading straight for the Thames some hundred feet below.

_Great_, he thought; he'd only just got this body, all shiny and new, and now he was going to die all over again while the TARDIS collided with the Clocktower further down the river…

Hang on.

He had a new body. A new, shiny body. And that meant that he had new wings: a pair of new, undamaged wings – wings that would be able to take flight.

For the first time since the Time War, he could _fly_.

He looked out to his sides, seeing a pair of light blue wings stretching out on either side of him, rather than the black and red ones of his previous life. He drew as much energy and as he could and pumped it into the wings; with a massive contraction of his muscles, he flapped them, laughing as he felt them lift him up rather than failing and leaving him to plummet to the icy depths of the river below.

Guffawing hysterically, he flew up to the TARDIS and through the open doors, feeling lighter than air as he ran towards the controls and changed the course so that they wouldn't collide with any major landmarks.

Yet the TARDIS was still in trouble, as things continued to fizz and spark and explode around him; it would no doubt need some time to fix itself – probably rebuild itself, as the damage was so extensive – and that would mean that he needed to at least try and land it somewhere safe.

A set of coordinates entered his fresh, new mind, and he put them in without a moment's hesitation; he was confident that there were no buildings there, and that there wouldn't be any people there – especially at this time of night – and thanked his newfound luck that he had managed to come up with them at a mere few seconds' notice.

His personal congratulations didn't last long, however, when another shudder sent him slipping across the floor again, this time away from the doors and deeper into the bowels of the ship.

There wasn't enough room in the corridors for him to be able flap his wings and stop his momentum, but the TARDIS – even in her distress – was able to shift the rooms around so that he landed in the swimming pool in the library rather than somewhere potentially painful.

He emerged from the depths of the pool a few moments later, gasping for air and soaked to the skin, his previous self's jumper incredibly heavy as it hung off of him, drenched with chlorinated water.

A loud _thud_ and a shudder filled the entire TARDIS, and the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief in the knowledge that they had landed – they had crash landed, but they had still landed.

The doors to the library were open, and because of its new location within the ship, that meant that he could see through the library doors all the way up to the outside world: the corridor outside ran straight from the library door to the control room, and the doors at the front of the TARDIS were still open, now facing a dark night sky – the TARDIS was on its side.

Thankful that the TARDIS hadn't landed on its other side, the Doctor pulled himself to his feet and rushed over to a nearby bookshelf to retrieve a rope attached to a grappling hook. Sarah Jane had made fun of him for having a rope attached to a grappling hook on a bookshelf in the library, but he now allowed himself to feel a small sense of smugness at the knowledge that he had been right at the time to assure her that, at some point – he didn't know when – having a rope attached to a grappling hook on a bookshelf in the library would be useful.

He swung it round a few times before throwing it up through the corridor now connecting the library with the control room, so that it caught on the same edge that he had reached (unsuccessfully) for when they had still been over the Thames, so that he could climb up and out of the ship.

Thirty seconds later, the Doctor – who, at some point during his ascent, had developed a sudden craving for apples – emerged from the TARDIS, his fingers curled around the bottom of the doorway and his head poking out into the outside world…

Only to be faced with a child in her nightie: a young girl with long red hair and a confused look on her face.

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**A.N.2:** Just in case you aren't familiar with Cockney Rhyming Slang, a Barnet (or Barnet Fair) is hair.

**A.N.3:** So, Ten's era is over (and Nine's) and now we're up to Eleven! Because, in this Verse, the Doctor has portrayed by David Tennant never actually existed, but the Doctor as portrayed by John Hurt did, Matt Smith's Doctor is actually the eleventh incarnation, but he sees himself as the tenth. If that makes sense...

**A.N.4:** The next fic in this Verse will hopefully be posted tomorrow; it's just a tiny little oneshot set at the very beginning of The Eleventh Hour, and after that there aren't anymore re-writes for a while!

**UPDATE 13/07/14:** Next part of the Angel!Verse, Amelia's Prayer, has been uploaded.


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